Modern local transportation networks rely heavily on ground infrastructure for the transportation of goods and people. More than half of the earth's population now lives in cities, with more than half a billion people living in megacities with populations exceeding 10 million people. In these high-density urban environments demand on ground transportation infrastructure has increased and continues to increase to the point that many metropolitan areas are heavily congested and road transportation networks are very inefficient. For example, the Texas Transportation Institute estimated that, in 2000, the 75 largest metropolitan areas experienced 3.6 billion vehicle-hours of delay, resulting in 5.7 billion gallons (21.6 billion liters) in wasted fuel and $67.5 billion in lost productivity. Traffic congestion is increasing in major cities and delays are becoming more frequent in smaller cities and rural areas. The inefficiencies are also dramatic in cities in many emerging countries or other locations where ground infrastructure has not scaled quickly enough to follow the population increase or the growth in the economy. In these places a new, scalable method of transportation that would reduce the demand on road infrastructure would be very desirable
At the same time, road infrastructure is non-existent or, at best, underdeveloped in many places in the developing world. More that one Billion people do not have access to all season roads today and are disconnected from all social and economic activity for some part of the year: they are unable to receive medicine or critical supplies reliably and they cannot get their goods to market in order to create a sustainable income. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, 85% of roads are unusable in the wet season. Investments are being made, but at the current rate of investment, it's estimated it's going to take these nations more than 50 years to catch up.
In much of the developed world, the cost efficiencies of many courier systems rely on the ‘spoke-hub’ distribution model. For example, to ship a package between two neighboring districts in a city, a vehicle has to pick up the parcel, take it to the sorting center (a facility usually several miles away from the city center), then back into the city center to deliver it to the destination. This model works well for reducing the cost of shipment where it's possible to aggregate packages that share a big part of the journey from origin to destination; it becomes inefficient though, if the ability to aggregate is diminished, as is the case in ‘last mile’ delivery problems.
At the same time personalized and decentralized access to information has become ubiquitous enabled by the expansion of the Internet and wireless telephony. Access to physical goods, however, remains hindered by the sometimes inflexible, inefficient (in energy, time and cost) transportation solutions of the present day. Modern digital connectedness amplifies the need for disruption of the current way goods and people are transported. Modern transportation solutions have significantly lagged behind the digital revolution.